Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

It’s time to stop looking at semantics as an academic topic, and time to start considering it in terms of the cost-savings and increased agility that semantic technologies may enable, one expert says.

Specifically, semantic web technologies potentially could solve a big problem that the growing move to service-oriented architectures (SOA) has brought into focus: Information interoperability.

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“As SOA has enabled a better information flow within the enterprise — and instead of having silo’d applications you have services that are loosely coupled and enable information to go between them — the need for those services to interpret the information in a consistent way has become more and more obvious,” says Dr. Chris Harding, forum director for SOA and semantic interoperability at The Open Group. The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium committed to enabling access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability.

“SOA is an improvement, a huge improvement, on previous architecture styles,” with a clear impact on making the enterprise more agile, Harding says. “But they could get a further big step change in improvement by addressing the semantic issues within SOA.”

Harding is careful to note that he isn’t 100 percent convinced that semantic web technologies are the exact right way to address this issue, leaving the door open to variations on the theme or completely different options. Nor is there conviction yet in the enterprise architecture community that are the core constituents of The Open Group that this is the specific way to solve their interoperability problems.

But Harding does think organizations should be putting time and effort into understanding the semantic web’s specifications, such as RDF and OWL, and gaining more experience in the area. Not that that’s a piece of cake.

“I think that as a concept that it is quite difficult to understand,” Harding said. “I think the W3C has actually written a very excellent set of specifications for RDF and OWL and so on, but it’s not what you call light reading. It does actually take a degree of intellectual effort to understand what these things are about, and I don’t think they are yet packaged in a way where the general readership can appreciate them.”

The Open Group may have a role to play here in helping to package this for the technical staff, as it publishes the TOGAF framework, an industry standard architecture framework that organizations can freely use to develop an information systems architecture for use within that organization.

“But in addition to the technical people, the business people are providing the money for all this, after all, and they need to understand this is a useful thing to invest money in,” Harding says. You might propose spending the money on developing an ontology of your business terminology to post on a web site, “but I’m not sure that a lot of people will put their hands on their hearts and say if you spend $100,000 on that this year, you’ll get a return of $500,000 next year,” he says.

So, while service-oriented architecture is now a proven concept, the industry has a lot farther to go to prove the value of the semantic web concept. But Harding does have a suggestion for what he personally thinks could deliver a quick payback from a semantic technology investment: Using semantics for a model-driven SOA implementation, where the architecture creates a model of the target system and then that model is automatically translated into an implementation.

“If you start from taking a semantic view and producing an ontology of your business information, then that will make it easier to do your model-driven implementation in a SOA environment,” he says. “So, having the ontology makes it easy to automatically generate the service definitions. Basically, what you are doing is you are taking a formal approach to defining what your enterprise information is, what the information is that will be exchanged by the services. Because you formalized the definitions, it is easy to generate the interface descriptions and the service descriptions from that formal definition of the information.”

The Open Group actually has a project underway itself to develop a formal ontology for SOA, partly because it should ease the way to a model-driven approach.

The organization is also working on a reference architecture to help enterprise architects understand what building blocks they should have in place to address semantic interoperability.

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